After Super Bowl Sunday, Lost-Productivity Monday?

In the lead up to this year's Super Bowl XVLI, fans of the New York Giants and New England Patriots likely devoted some of their work time discussing or analyzing what is arguably America's premier sporting event.

Yet employers are likely to see the greatest impact on productivity today -- the day after the big game -- as workers congregate around water coolers, chat over cubicle walls or otherwise gather to discuss it.

For each employee, companies lose an average of $3.16 for every 10 minutes of time used discussing the Super Bowl and activities related to the game, such as managing office pools, according to employment-services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

Super Bowl revelers find the Monday after particularly difficult to manage, Challenger says, noting that some devoted fans have even started a campaign to make post-Super Bowl Monday a national work holiday.

The Workforce Institute at Kronos estimates that some 4.4 million employees will come to work late today, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Harris Interactive. The survey further shows that absences related to the Super Bowl are high among young adults, especially men aged 18 to 34; more in that group reported calling in sick than any other, according to the poll of more than 3,000 adults.

The findings were similar to those of Glassdoor, which found in a survey last year that about 3 percent of employees will take a sickday on the Monday following the Super Bowl, while three times as many plan to use a vacation day to avoid coming to work.

Among other findings, Glassdoor's survey revealed that a fifth of employees surveyed say that morale is typically better in the office the day after the Super Bowl.

However, 22 percent of employees also said it's commonly a less productive day than usual.

"[Today] is going to be a day of impaired productivity, for sure," human-resource consultant Jack Milligan tells KTAR in Phoenix.

Many people are expected to overindulge at Super Bowl parties and then call in sick to work, says Milligan, principal at Leathers, Milligan & Associates LLC.